and intriguing divertisements. He is far more virtuous than they
make him out, far less schooled in sin far less enterprising and
ruthless. I do not say, of course, that he is pure in heart, for the
chances are that he isn't; what I do say is that, in the overwhelming
majority of cases, he is pure in act, even in the face of temptation.
And why? For several main reasons, not to go into minor ones.
One is that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks the
money. Another is that he is fundamentally moral, and has a
conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he has in him to
plunge into any affair save the most casual and sordid; it takes more
ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to carry it off; it takes
more money than he can conceal from his consort to finance it.
A man may force his actual wife to share the direst poverty, but
even the least vampirish woman of the third part demands to be
courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand manner,
and the expenses of that grand manner scare off all save a small
minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife
knows her husband's in come accurately, she has a sure means of
holding him to his oaths.


Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of
poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the
other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his
easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd
behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of
initiating an extra-legal affair--at all events, above the mawkish
harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is
of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing
it, just as he likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or